I recently asked for recommendations for open-source web development software at the Piksel list. below is a wind up of replies.
There are several WYSIWYG editors available. Kompzer and NvU are different branches of the same development project. Kompozer seems to be the easiest to use at the moment. Tutorials for them can be found here:
http://www.yourmachines.org/tutorials/nvu.html
http://en.flossmanuals.net/NvU
Amaya is the W3C’s WYSIWYG webpage editor. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.
Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners with many options to write websites scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. On mac OSX Bluefish requires X11 and Fink.
Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. Quanta is based on KDE so this means it is network transparent from any dialog or project.
For simple projects Mozilla Composer might be an option. There is also a web developer extension for Firefox. Or you could make web pages in OpenOffice.
One reply indicated that open-source solutions might still have some way to go: Websites are my paid day job and after trying and trying for a year I had to give in and admit that there isn’t anything that compares in the oss world if you want productivity. Bluefish is the only editor I can live with longer then half an hour. vim drives me crazy.
Another reply suggested that WordPress might be a better way to go for artists: Stop hacking html files and get a wordpress install. For around twenty dollars you can get a wordpress.com hosted blog with your own choice of domain name.
And finally CMS software like Typo3 or a href=“http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/”>CMS Made Simple which might be the right tool or not for your specific task. They are good for collaborative work on a website with or without defined roles.
